Hi all, thank you for all your welcomes and kindness. As some of you may be aware, I have the same thread on thecarversite.com as well. Keeping two threads with the same subject going seems superfluous and unnecessary. Therefore, I have decided to post all my future postings on the other site, and I invite you to join me there. Please do not think I favor the other site over this site.

A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

In a recent press conference, President Obama remarked, "If I had a city, it would look just like Detroit."

At the request of Bob Carver, I will continue to post on this site. How can I refuse Bob? So here is goes...

OK. I received two 8 pin Teflon tube sockets with Tellurium Copper pins to see how they fit my KT88, 274B, and 6SN7 tubes. These are very sturdy and heavy for their size. As you can see, the pins do not have the highly polished jewelry gold shine of most other socket pins because there is no sound degrading nickel plating underneath the gold plating. The Tellurium Copper pins are plated with silver and then gold. These are very high quality, but unfortunately expensive.

Here are my test tubes. From left to right, stock KT88 power tube from the Cherry 180, Sophia Electric rigid plate Princess 274B rectifier tube, Shuguang Black Treasure CV181-Z (6SN7) tube, and Sophia Electric 6SN7 tube. The Sophias are the best rectifier and 6SN7 tubes I've heard. The Black Treasure is as good or almost as good depending on system configuration.

The Teflon sockets fit all the tube very securely except for the Black Treasure tube. For the life of me, I can't get the tube pins to go completely into the socket. See the small gap between the top surface of the socket and tube base. The Treasures do have the thickest tube pins of the bunch. May be once the socket is installed into the chassis I can force it all the way in without worrying about damaging the tube.

Look at them apples from Deulund . Just received the four output coupling caps (0.47 microF) and two feedback caps (2.2 microF) in the signal path of Bob's amp. These are the brown copper foil PIO CAST caps, their top of the line besides the silver foil which are astronomically high priced. As reference, the 22 microF Mundorf Supreme caps which are 10 times the capacitance of the feedback caps aren't that much bigger. The Deulunds are quite heavy due to the dense resonant control impregnating material.